After the Flood

“After the Flood” opens Laughing Stock, the final Talk Talk record and — along with Spirit of Eden — the document that invented post-rock before the genre had a name. Nine and a half minutes built around a two-chord organ figure, long stretches of near-silence, and a guitar solo at the five-minute mark that sounds like someone shouting from the bottom of a well.

Mark Hollis spent months in the studio assembling this record from improvised takes recorded almost entirely in the dark, and “After the Flood” bears all the evidence of that process — a song that behaves less like a composition and more like a weather system the band happened to walk into. Put it on in the dark and let it pass.